They probably just haven't gussied up the page for the release version yet. If you're feeling gutsy, though, why not take up Nightly [mozilla.org]? The current builds are very stable and have better memory management than 6 will probably provide.

I wouldn't recommend Nightly for normal browsing. You'd be better off with Aurora [mozilla.com] (Firefox 7) if you want the new features sooner but also like to be sure Firefox will start after every update.

In general, I'd agree with you—I've been burned on bad nightlies on a few occasions in the past—but truth be told, they've been smooth sailing since FF4 came out. Either the devs are getting more careful, or less ambitious. *shrug*

So now I only have 2 plugins left not supported by FF4, should I upgrade to FF6? My bank also keeps saying FF4 is unsupported (only supports IE6+ and NS and FF3). Hmm, at this rate FF is going to lose users.

Maybe it's your bank that should be losing users. If they don't keep up with browser developments, they most likely will be lacking in their security developments as well? Myself I'd expect chrome, safari and the (almost) latest firefox on the list of supported browsers of any bank that I would take seriously.

Changing banks is quite a lot hard than changing browser. I know from experience several years ago of changing my bank for not supporting anything other than IE6.

On the other hand, I do expect my bank to be fairly conservative in the rate at which it makes site changes (unless to patch a security issue); I understand that testing, validation and sign-off of new versions takes quite a while in a large organisation and I realise that operations people may want to schedule upgrade to a new version of the site for a particular time with some notice.

I don't work in finance, but I do deliver web-based systems, and have been wondering what to do about the rise of Chrome and its frequent silent upgrades. My strategy on projects has been to promise support for the most important IEs (soon, I hope, that won't include IE6), the last couple of major Firefoxen, and current Safari. Chrome is on a best efforts, should work but no guarantees, basis which has worked while it had fairly small share.

Now that Firefox moves its update regime in the same direction as Chrome (incidentally, as it's been doing in many choices for interface, multiprocess Electrolysis work, etc.), it's less clear what to do. I can deliver a version that works with the current Firefox, but I couldn't promise in a contract that it'll continue to work with as yet unreleased versions. If I deliver a site tested with Firefox 6 today (and tested, but not certified, with the FF7 branch) then it'll still sound out of date by the end of the year when we're all on FF9 or FF10.

Mozilla's answer is that we should all just forget about version numbers and trust that the stream of updates probably won't break things (and if it does it'll be for good reasons -- honest). All well and good but doesn't fit with the way many organisations manage things. Since 4.0, I've stopped evangelizing about Firefox; Mozilla have become yet another software company who cause me grief rather than something to be proud of.

Unfortunately six of the plugins I rely on (yes, those plugins that are supposedly the #1 reason to use Firefox over less customizable browsers) don't yet even support Firefox 5. Everytime that "update Firefox" box comes up, I check, find six plugins outstanding, and back out of it.

This is why they are encouraging extension developers to switch to the Mozilla addons SDK which provides API stability between firefox releases (and is built in in firefox 4.0+ ). the addon SDK also allows for installing plugins without restarting the browser!! YEAH!!!

with that enabled you can forcibly enable addons that claim to not be compatible and test to see if they work. Also it gives you a away to send feedback to the developer that "hey it works" or "no it doesn't". And of course if you haven't contacted the developers of those addons, then that could be why they haven't been updated.

well isn't that special, the user is supposed to spend lots of time each quarter and hope they come up with the right tests to check everything? apparently, some of the add-on developers don't like that schedule either.

that's the exciting new trend spreading across the major open source projects, disruptive but half-baked changes. Ubuntu with Unity, GNOME, KDE, Firefox. What other major project will have its developers flip the users the bird and fly off into the Land of Un-Usability? stay tuned, there really are a couple more in the pipe.....

Mozilla's good enough to manually scan all add-ons hosted at addons.mozilla.org and bump compatibility on any that don't use APIs which have changed. We have over 90% compatibility with AMO hosted add-ons that way. Unfortunately, not all add-ons are hosted at AMO and even though AMO makes the scanning tools available to anyone, many not-hosted-at-AMO add-ons don't avail themselves of this option.

Unfortunately six of the plugins I rely on (yes, those plugins that are supposedly the #1 reason to use Firefox over less customizable browsers) don't yet even support Firefox 5. Everytime that "update Firefox" box comes up, I check, find six plugins outstanding, and back out of it.

Update too fast and you will leave users behind.

I used to encourage Firefox use in my shop... I gave my users the choice of IE and Firefox, and back when IE had that huge list of old unpatched holes, I told my users that I preferred FireFox if they were so inclined.

I've taken FF off of the approved list. The upgrades are coming too fast, and breaking too many things (mostly plugins, as the parent poster noted).

After years of requiring IE6 for Web Apps, work finally officially encouraged Firefox 3.6 for Internet usage and pushed it through their central software manager. That was only a couple months ago and now its more hopelessly obsolete than IE6.

Talking about that annoying message, is there a Firefox Addon for Firefox 4 that automatically closes that upgrade box? That spammy upgrade dialog box has been the reason for me to stop using Firefox unless I am in need of using one of those plugins.

Talking of extensions (I believe the above poster is actually referring to extensions rather than plugins, plugins generally don't break with new versions), is there any easy way to determine whether or not my current set of extensions are compatible with a given version? I'm on Debian so all of my updates come through my package manager, and the 'easiest' way at the moment seems to be cross-referencing each extension (all twenty-six of them) with Firefox Add-ons, which tedious in the extreme.

Amen. Breaking plugins every six weeks isn't going to make your users stay, nor get the plugin developers to bother making plugins for Firefox anymore.One of the plugins I used to use, from a rather large company, is no more with FF 5 and newer. They decided to stop supporting Firefox, and I don't blame them at all - when your own product is on a yearly release schedule, there's simply no way to keep up with Firefox. To do so, even if they could allocate resources outside schedule, would mean dropping dec

This!I hadn't considered that in a while... OS X is the only mainstream OS that makes changes subtle. Except for updating the brushed metal pattern every couple releases to some other fill-in, it's almost been a GUI luddite because the Doc keeps the same location, size and main form. When they do something like adding those Download / Recent document stacking thingies, they avoid clashing with the rest of the GUI.

What matters most is that for a full decade they avoided the huge Luna-like buttons, and won't

This!I hadn't considered that in a while... OS X is the only mainstream OS that makes changes subtle

That's because Apple recognizes that the average consumer wants consistency and stability, not new bling and features every few months. The consistency and reliability is also the main reason IOS apps are generally perceived to be of higher quality than Android apps

- The sidebar has been given a mystifying bath to get rid of any hints of colour, so you have to actually look at the shape or read the word before clicking- "Devices" isn't there by default, and when you restore it's at the bottom of the sidebar, unlike every release of OS X up until now.- Where'd my scrollbar go? Why am I scrolling the wrong way?- Luna-like buttons? Weren't they a poor imitation of Aqua? Not that that is still there... all hints of Aqua's 3D-popping is gone for

Understand you live in an era where people have a historically unprecedented ability to express their opinions that nobody gives a fuck about. Why don't you do like the rest of us and just ignore everyone else?

I still don't understand why they elected to change to this system of releasing major versions every flippin month. The old system was working just fine, why can't this be Fx 5.5? And save v6 for when there are actually some major changes that deserve a major version.

No doubt. When I read the OP, all I could think of was that of was what an understatement it is to say they released version 6 early when you consider that 4.0 came out a few months ago. Given all the really bad decisions Mozilla has made lately, I have to wonder if they've ever heard of this little old browser called Netscape? History seems to be repeating itself.

Meanwhile most of the customers coming into my shop still run Firefox 3. Why are they releasing major versions so frequently, there's going to be a lot of people with very low Firefox version numbers that don't know they're 10 versions behind and wouldn't know how to fix that.

That'd be easier to do if instead of Firefox 6 they called it FIrefox 11-8 (2011, Aug.) That way they can release multiple editions on their quick schedule and you'd know the year and month it was released just by knowing the version number.

I can understand companies not being in touch with their customers, but does Mozilla not even read tech sites like Slashdot? Every story about Firefox lately is filled with exactly how negatively people feel about this version number fiasco.

Chrome was able to get away with bumping version numbers because it was a very new product and nobody was depending on it yet. Even though they removed the "beta" tag surprisingly early on (for a Google product), I think many people STILL consider Chome as "beta".

On the other hand large corporate type applications were just beginning to support Firefox and depended on long term support of major versions. Well, that has just been stomped in the face. Sadly, from a corporate stand point the only browser that really seems stable, viable, and "corporate friendly" now is IE.

The other issue is that Chrome doesn't tie compatibility to version numbers. When I update Chrome I don't get a box telling me it is disabling half my extensions/apps. For the most part, everything just works. So, the number is just a number.

Mozilla's problem is that they assume extensions don't work after major version changes, which basically imposes arbitrary breakage. So, the number isn't just a number in their case.

Sadly, from a corporate stand point the only browser that really seems stable, viable, and "corporate friendly" now is IE.

I can't speak for anyone else, but we just reviewed our browser support policy for one of our clients, and I'm afraid Firefox has now joined Chrome on the "not supported" list. We aren't developing a public web site, we're developing control software for equipment that clients pay very large sums of money for. If we say we support a particular browser, that comes with serious strings attached, and that in turn means there has to be a stable version with reasonably long-term support expected that we can test

They do, in fact last time we had one of the devs basically apologizing for that idiot Asa.

But most of Mozilla lives in an "I'm awesome!" echo chamber and they really don't understand why other people don't play along. I mean what other excuse is there for the abortion that is the Thunderbird 5 UI? No doubt to be fixed in Thunderbird 18. Maybe.

This happens to projects sometimes. They just go off the pot and turn wacky. When that happens its time to go elsewhere.

I can understand companies not being in touch with their customers, but does Mozilla not even read tech sites like Slashdot? Every story about Firefox lately is filled with exactly how negatively people feel about this version number fiasco.

Chrome was able to get away with bumping version numbers because it was a very new product and nobody was depending on it yet. Even though they removed the "beta" tag surprisingly early on (for a Google product), I think many people STILL consider Chome as "beta".

On the other hand large corporate type applications were just beginning to support Firefox and depended on long term support of major versions. Well, that has just been stomped in the face. Sadly, from a corporate stand point the only browser that really seems stable, viable, and "corporate friendly" now is IE.

Hi, I'm a Firefox dev. Yes, we read Slashdot:)

There is a big tradeoff here, with downsides both ways. You correctly point out that some people are having problems with the new fast release schedule. That's a fact, and we are doing all we can, but the problems are hard (addons, enterprise users, etc.).

On the other hand, the alternative is to continue with a slow release schedule, which we feel has bigger problems and would annoy more users. For example, FF8 will have much better memory usage than Firefox 4. Releasing new versions quickly lets users get that benefit quicker - fewer users will have memory problems because we ship the fixes faster. As another example, when IE9 and FF4 came out, at roughly the same time, they had comparable performance on some canvas benchmarks (in which they outperformed all other browsers due to their being the only browsers to use Direct2D). Meanwhile Firefox has released twice (counting FF6 on next Tuesday), and as a consequence, Firefox users have better performance than IE users, simply because IE users are still on IE9 while Firefox users can run FF5 and FF6 which include a lot more performance improvements that were committed after FF4.

Another major issue is new web standards. For standards to evolve quickly, browsers need to ship new versions with new implementations of those standards. Firefox and Chrome are now leading that, by releasing every 6 weeks. As one example, both support the new (safe) version of web sockets. That pushes the web forward, letting developers use it quicker, and eventually let all of us benefit from those new features. Chrome began this push, and I think Google was right to do it, and Firefox is joining that.

Is the new release schedule perfect? Of course not. It has problems for both browsers doing it, Chrome and Firefox. Both are probably not seen very favorably among enterprise users. And Firefox has some additional challenges, what with transitioning a previous release schedule to this one. But still, both Chrome and Firefox feel it is worthwhile. So again, I realize that there are problems. But overall I think the fast release schedule of Chrome and Firefox is a good thing.

I don't think anyone really minds if new versions are released often, but the issue of add-ons breaking because of the chosen versioning scheme is probably the largest annoyance. You can still release often without changing the major version number, at least until you can convince add-on developers to use the new SDK.

The problem is that Chrome and Firefox 6-week updates can and do change functionality and break internal APIs. Regardless of whether those browsers raise the major version number, addons can break.

Chrome deals with this by having a limited addon API that does remain stable. This limits what addons you can write for Chrome, but it does make 80% of addons possible and with less upgrade hassle.

Firefox is moving to allow that approach with the jetpack SDK. However addons that don't use that SDK are relying on internal Firefox APIs, and the power and flexibility that that gives does mean they are at risk for breaking. Note that Mozilla's addons website will automatically check the code of addons hosted on it for actual API incompatibilities, and auto-mark as compatible addons that are not at risk. So a lot of addons 'just work' because of that. But still, some addons do rely on changing APIs, and some addons are not hosted on addons.mozilla.org, so the authors need to manually update them.

On the other hand, the alternative is to continue with a slow release schedule, which we feel has bigger problems and would annoy more users. For example, FF8 will have much better memory usage than Firefox 4.

Then name "FF8" FF4.5 and be done with it. Are we really to believe that the better mallocs are tied to the new UI features?

There are downsides to naming it FF8 and downsides to naming it FF4.5. For example, calling it FF4.5 might lead people to assume there are no API changes (point releases often mean just that). But Chrome and Firefox do change APIs and functionality with their 6-week updates. So it is technically more correct for both of those browsers to bump the major version number each time - even though it does feel odd, and I admit it annoys me personally (but I am slowly getting used to it).

Thanks for your response. There certainly are plenty of people out there who demand the absolute latest and greatest, and demand it yesterday. You are certainly making these people very happy right now.

But I believe you have seriously underestimated the impact of alienating the needs of your more technical, corporate, enterprise users and developers.

As evidenced by the responses on Slashdot, many are finding it more difficult if not impossible to fully support a rapidly changing target. This means more inte

No reason, but it wouldn't solve much either. Whether we called 5 something like 4.1, doesn't affect the fact that 5/4.1 does have some incompatibilities with 4.0 (new APIs, deprecated APIs, bugfixes to existing APIs, etc.). So calling it 4.1 would not have solved the real issue, and would have potentially made things worse by making some addons think they would work when they won't (but it would have made some addons work that currently don't, that's true).

What's important is to have LTS release for the enterprise.
Like FF4, FF8 could be LTS. LTS means security fixes. Also have MSI packages for those lazy admins that can't create one themselves.
That's mostly all that is needed and just need ONE guy at Mozilla, not even full time, to please the internet and enterprise.

I agree 100% that Firefox should have an LTS release. Also that we need MSI packages. However, I want to clarify that it would be a lot more than one person can do: It is a lot of work to maintain a stable release, you need lots of QA for every update and for every single OS it will run on. You also need support from other parts of the organization, from build infrastructure to technical documentation. Overall it is a significant effort to really do it seriously and properly.

I agree a corporate-friendly version is important. It's a lot of time and effort, though - Red Hat does it well, but then that is exactly Red Hat's prime mission, supporting a rock-solid OS for a long time. It might be possible for Mozilla too, but it would be a lot of effort, which worries me.

I'm not too worried about IE cornering the enterprise market, though. For one thing Apple laptops are getting very popular there. Also enterprise users are starting to do more and more browsing from smartphones and

I don't think I have ever been arrogant about Firefox. I feel the opposite actually - typical neurotic geek over here. So it's hard for me to understand what you mean: I think it's a humbling experience to be a dev in a big open source project like Firefox, I keep trying to do my best to improve the product so users like you will like it. When that doesn't happen, it makes me sad and I doubt myself. So I don't know why you think Firefox devs are arrogant - I feel exactly the opposite.

Again, sorry that you are so upset about this. I wish I could do something to help.

dissent due to breaking compatibility with tools users use, losing features they use, and hampering productivity are a reason to change. The internet is *filling* with negativity for firefox, caused by the loss of common sense by the Mozilla Corporation. It is reason enough to change to Seamonkey or Chrome.

So... 40 posts about how much better the support experience would be if they incremented it by 0.1 instead of 1.0, as if the bugs somehow know which digit was incremented. But, no comments about the actual browser? For example, have they finally reverted "tabs on top"?

It's people like you that are making so much noise. For example, when FF4 was released, everyone bitched that the dropdown menu was gone from the back and forward buttons. They wailed that there was no way to go back in the history more than one page at a time.

Of course, that was entirely false. All they had to do was one of two things. Right click on the button and the history dropdown appears, or click and hold and it appears. It's like people have forgotten that they can actually poke around and fig

I disagree. Good UI design is intuitive, sure. However, basic functionality needs to be obvious. More advanced functionality can require some learning curve. Going back multiple pages simply isn't something the majority of people start out doing. Even with a dropdown, they often don't even realize they can do it.

I think it's perfectly acceptable that advanced features require knowledge, and not be in your face obvious.

We're not talking about clueless people here. We're talking about slashdot users, and those in other forums for technical support. These are more advanced users, and those perfectly capable of digging around.

As I said in another post, this is not basic functionality, it's more advanced and there's nothing wrong with more advanced functionality needing to have some knowledge to utilize.

You can't make every feature in your face obvious. That clutters the UI, and makes it harder for users. You have to make more advanced features less obvious, or else it ruins the usability of the interface. Further, I don't consider right clicking on something to be all that un-obvious. We've been using context menus for almost 20 years now.

But the question is which users? If a UI changes makes things better or easier for 80% of the users but pisses off 20% of the users, then I'd say go for it. The back button history dropdown makes the UI look less cluttered and saves screen real-estate. Most average users never use the dropdown. It's an overall win. Only the vocal 5% minority chooses to scream death instead of rightclicking and moving on.

Upon installing, it says "Welcome to Firefox Beta". In "About Firefox", it doesn't mention anything about beta though. So I'm not exactly sure if this is beta. If it is beta, it's weird it's available by a URL that has no mention of "beta", no?

Did they fix the F6 behavior? In previous versions, when you pressed F6 it selected the address bar. In 5.0 it did something else (seems to do something useless with frames) and I could not find the about:config item to fix it.

When Chrome finally fixes text-shadow rendering on Windows and doesn't act like a lazy dog when you set background-size: cover on a fixed background image, let me know. On that day, you just might be right.

On Chrome it's Ctrl+Shift+O -- Bookmark manager.
I prefer Firefox's separate window approach, and it does give you better sorting options, but it's not entirely fair to say that it's not possible to find things in the bookmarks menu in Chrome.

1. Memory leaks have been a major issue of recent Firefox development. Current FF 8 nightly builds use a tiny fraction of older versions, and they're extremely stable. This is accomplished by no longer caching previous pages (so if you go back, you'll have to reload from scratch.) I've got a cool 200 tabs open right now in a very old session and it's only using about 500 MB of RAM.

2. The status bar can be restored with this extension [mozilla.org]. Addon compatibility is likely to be more stable in the foreseeable future since most of the major architectural changes were around the 3-to-4 transition.

3. Firefox doesn't run on the iPad. Are you a troll, technically inexperienced, or in a state of reduced mental capacity?

No, they didn't, and that was a bit of an overstatement. I think some things expire according to staleness, though, and there have been a few occasions where backing up through a form submitted by POST resulted in the browser fetching the page via GET without mention of any of the POST headers. If you want to know the actual and intended status of things, here [slashdot.org] might be a good place to start researching.

There is a great fork, Seamonkey. Runs on Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OSX, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFly (for the *BSD use their ports collection) . The latest version 2.2 came out 07 July 2011. Runs all the firefox addons I use, though you'd have to check the ones you like.

I don't think this should have been modded down, it sounds like a Firefox experience that is sadly going to become more common for average users.

Don't know if anybody even noticed, but Mozilla shut down Spreadfirefox.com (now it just redirects to a page on Mozilla's main site) just before they released Firefox 4. Admittedly, the community had already gone down the toilet and the site was mostly just collecting spam.

(also the poster said he started using an iPad with Safari, not that he had been using Firefo

Version numbers have been bad for decades- marketing people wanting whole version numbers like 5.0 so update end up 5.0.1 and other silly games in the other direction.

What they should be doing is Firefox #.build# so you get the feature set and the build number. They seem to forget developers make the web apps they run too! a whole version number should remain somewhat static as far as features that cause any noticeable changes and bug fixes can go into the build numbers. When they actually do something

Exactly, and you can still customize your browser. The fact that you can't even change basic history settings in Chrome, let alone all the about:config tweaks in Firefox, has made me stay loyal to Firefox. If Chrome actually let you have decent customization and decent extensions, I might switch. But the complete lack of customization has stopped me from using Chrome.

The old interface is cluttered and wasteful. Most people will say that isn't considered "working". If you want the old interface, make a few checkmarks under View and you're there. It's shocking that people on a site that's supposed to be for "nerds" do not know how to use GUI menus.

It's shocking just how out of touch Mozilla has become. This whole "clutter" argument from self titled "UI experts" is just tiresome now.

Most of us don't want change for the sake of change. Change for the sake of change is -never- a good thing and just pisses off users. And it seems like everything is changing for the sake of change such as GNOME, Facebook, and now Firefox. At least with Firefox the UI is customizable enough I don't have to deal with the hideous new UI which you can't change really fore GNOME 3 or Facebook.